In which Matt Gets a Twitter

So I finally bit the bullet last night and signed up for a Twitter account. As is my nature, this made me start thinking about things. The following is nothing that hasn’t been said before, but I want to rehash it because of the time of year.

Twitter, blogs, and the like have completely changed the way we can follow baseball and I absolutely love every second of it. My father and his friends may get nostalgic for the days of yore when the newspapers had a monopoly over the coverage of baseball, but I can’t think of any other way I’d rather have it.

Today’s world of constant coverage may get annoying with the actual news cycle in which sound bytes replace actual analysis, but in the baseball world, it’s mostly good. The fact that we can know about trade rumors, how prospects are playing, and the like is just all sorts of awesome. There are, of course, some drawbacks.

Our culture has gotten to be one that is almost reliant on instant gratification and patience is a virtue that few posses anymore, and the sports world is no different. Reporters and fans alike want instant success and instant explanations. Because of this, people tend to ignore any lengthy analysis and go for the quick-grab answer of the narrative. However, we can easily overlook this and find the more rational, detached reactions to things that happen in the baseball world. It’s also something with which I’m willing to put up if I can get up to the millisecond updates about trades and free agent signings. The days in which we had to wait for the evening news or the new SportsCenter to find out if trades were made are now dead and I couldn’t be happier about that.

Blogs have also changed baseball coverage in a generally positive way. Any abundance of opinions is welcome and though all the blogs out there can lead to a lot of white noise, but the best ones are the ones that end up popular. The “blogosphere” is the Internet’s finest example of a true meritocracy.

The question, then, is where does it go from here? Is there any way for us to be more instant and more inundated with baseball information and updates? I really don’t think there is. But, of course, I’m sure something new and exciting will come out and I’ll drag my feet to join that party, just like I did with Twitter.